Live Dangerously!

It's what I'm beginning to call the Curse of Domestic Routine (CDR). It means the repetition of certain acts, certain smiles, the passing of certain drinks, the artificiality of certain poses, the cowgazed hypnotic adoration of televised sports, the chaos of undisciplined children, the libinal air of adolescent wishes, all in proximity to the family, the American home in particular. In summa: comfortability. If it must be expressed philosophically, its veins are tied in with the Utilitarian canon that pain should be negated and pleasure augmented. Otherwise known as the American dream. Otherwise esoterically known as an existential nightmare with an attractive covering, like a sex-gorged teen movie. This is where most everyone wants to be. This is what people wish for during the week. This is the telos of nine-tenths of the industrialized world. "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death" (Proverbs 14:12).

What is depth? It seems man is spiritually crafted to smell out superficiality; and so many are bursting at the seams with a suffocating sense of revulsion towards what they see that they surrender themselves to the cycle by choosing the insulating possibilities the cycle itself offers. The popular form is the drink. Alcohol negates the pains of consciousness by virtually negating consciousness itself, leaving the narcoleptic remainders in a cloudburst of sillyfaced emotions. There is a danger in life running too fast, lest it slip by us. In our nihilistic times, we're constantly looking forward to a future without a face -- simply because the present is otherwise too boring, too irascibile, too farcical, too unbearable. Too repetitive. Indeed, the sense of farce hides behind repetition. The world is too absurd when it rings hollow, and precisely here is when we're most adept at hearing God screaming for our attention behind our earthsick nerves. But too often our bondage to the attention and acceptance of others prevents us from consummating the deal. Man is an animal so deep in social bondage that he would choose unhappiness with the mask of happiness over happiness without a mask. Ironic a society openly reproaches prostitution. We're all whores to each other.

What is depth? An escape from routine. An embrace with the new. What is it that prevents this? Our daring. Unwillingness to crucify the boundaries of our comfort. There is probably nothing more antithetical to keeping life alive than an absolute value for comfort. "The secret of realising the greatest fruitfulness and the great enjoyment of existence is to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!" -- Nietzsche

Death

You'll die. Does it really matter when? A big promotion, recognition, your marriage day, bad weather -- waiting for these things is different. It matters when they happen. We organize our lives around them -- around, that is, with the preplan before and after. But death allows for no after. It might as well happen today or in forty-seven years.

You will die. Daddy Heidegger held that the realization of one's death is the beginning of life. His belief is true, but not exclusively true. How often a man has fallen in love with a woman who has been in his life for a ridiculously long amount of time. The blinders fall, come thou erotic click, and the whole world is seen again with her as its scintillating nucleous, a centrifugal center whose endless periphery is the endless universe. Death does not exist for those in love with life. At the most it can undermine, but its face never needs to be seen. And for those to whom it does exist, it exists only as a phantom. Never touched in its brute baseless blackness, but delusionally created, placebo-like, with each fear of it -- that is, fiction. To fear death, to even consider death a threat, is a symptom of a mal-lived life. To live is a continual oscillation between assertion and absorption, action and reward. To fear death is neither to act nor to be rewarded. To fear death is to sit.

The child who laughs, gloriously possessed with its laughter; the lovers intoxicated with their fresh-faced love; the naturalistic, meditative awe of the old, always content, secretly happy -- these are examples of life, and one cannot live without forgetting the falsity of death, and forgetting falsity is negative realization.

You will die. Imagine your death. I can imagine mine. It will be painful, perhaps, slow or sudden, or narcotically soft-served; perhaps cancer that ceaselessly rides your nerves, tormenting, tormenting, or perhaps a car crash that catches you before pain has a chance to. But you can't do a damn thing about it. This revelation is epiphanic, not miserable -- what comes by necessity comes by necessity; the necessary is the taken care of, and we have other things to do.

No matter how darkly you write it out, we precede death; death does not precede us. The singular moment where the biological process retires, we have already done so as well, somewhere between this moment and the one that precedes it, but never in the moment itself. Well then. The question of the hereafter. You will either cease to exist or live again. Thus stands the dialectic of death.

Live your life. Or you will die without dying. This is the death that can be tasted, but how often its realization passes us by; we, so busy with future plans, dead already. This is the life you can change. Live it.

I'd Like to Say Something

I have absolutely no idea where I'm going in life. The East would call this a virtue; Zen, pour exemple, is the realization of the fallacy of tensed existence -- neither the past nor the future exists, but only the present (and there is no singular experiencer of this present; the inner and the outer is a single monistic entity), and the task of the (pseudo-)individual is to "play it all by ear", and let the cosmos sweep oneself along. But the West, ah, to the West this is a symptom of disease. Everyone must at least have a hazy impression -- the shred of an inkling of secure, insulating certainty, whether this certainty is grounded in delusion or not, and it always to a degree is. Well, I don't have this impression. Or, better to say, I refuse to submit to the temptation to having one. And I don't understand why the hell anyone either should or could have such a thing. We're like children running naked down a beach convinced we're fully clothed, laughing corrosively when someone tells us we're not.

There is no sin in planning. There is danger: the danger of losing the spontaneity of the world, thereby losing the world -- the synthesis of subject and object -- completely. And, oh resentful religieux, it isn't the world that steals one's soul, but the resignation of the soul to the world, which is infinitely qualitatively different. The world isn't a foreign, mechanical "out-there" that merely panders with our minds and tempts our wills; the world is very much a basis for our being, for all breath needs a breather; all souls need bodies; and all bodies exist in the world. To lose the world is to thus lose oneself, for the human being is a synthesis between soul and body (not a vague, incomprehensible ghost in a machine, of all outdated Cartesian hangovers). The world, in its proper relation, is meant at the least to teach, at the most to bless, and it can function only through serendipity -- through the sponatenous dance between self and its malleable physical backdrop called "world". Steal serendipity; put in its place a categorized conceptual network of ideational preplanning. Do this and you've only painted the walls of the world with your own pathetic little self. Your preexisting concepts have taken over. You have blocked the world out; ideas, remember, are also based on phenomena, outer existence -- the objectivity that "is" that subjectivity feeds on.

What is it that pushes the man who wants order? Fear, perhaps; he fears himself against the backdrop of the nakedness of the world. This fear is absolutely incomptabile with any palatable understanding of faith. Faith, at heart, is the letting go of one's desire for omnipotence, for control of one's own world, into the hands of God, who is capable of finishing where finitude falters. Faith is the art of breathing. With the newness of the world under the rubric of experience one breathes in -- one criticizes and integrates the "out there" through one's God-relation; and through freedom one exhales one's own little being on the world, shifting it, imperceptibly at times, conspicuously at others, according to the force and manner of how one exhales, according to the relative completion of one's continual part. Breathing, faith, is the synthesis between these two terms, not simply, as is the popular quip of theological circles, believing the right things. One must believe -- and act! One must open himself to realization and work accordingly. Faith without works is dead. Breathing without exhalation is fatal fantasy.

We don't need consciousness of our direction outside of four or five steps. History has shown us continually that ideas so charismatically clung to with the conviction of rightness have been either been revised beyond realization, or carelessly discarded. Personal experience has taught us that deception feeds, voraciously, on the inclination to expectation; again and again, whether through our own eyes or in witnessing others, we've seen the truth bleed through broken hearts. No, we must admit to our ignorance. Only then can we find value in trust, the perfection of faith. Only then can we learn to breathe freely, not constricted or elated with each uncertain tidbit that comes our way. No, if there is a kingdom at all accessible for anyone on earth, it must be within, uncorruptible by the world, unswervable by perception, cleansed and quarantined from all negativities that work themselves towards unhappiness. We need an unshakeable hope, or else despair is only a matter of time. And how tragic, how sad, that these words are music only for mystics:

"Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." -- Luke 17:21